- News Items of Interest to CWOP Members May 04, 2008 - There was a short article in The New York Times today about Bradley Feldman's CWOP weather station taking the temperature of Brownstone Brooklyn. You can read and enjoy it here.
Apr 18, 2008 - This graph shows number of weather stations using different APRS servers on a daily basis since the start of the year. NH means non-ham; HM means ham; CR means CORE servers; CW means CWOP servers; and OT means other servers including Tier 2 servers.
Apr 14, 2008 - Regarding server changes, Roger Dickey (CW9396) reports "I am using open2300 software. While it has a configuration file, the first two server names are hard coded. Open2300 users will have to find the server names in the file rw2300.c, change them to cwop and recompile. I had changed my configuration file and it ‘worked’. In fact, aprswest was the hard coded default."
Apr 12, 2008 - Some APRS servers, which previously accepted citizen weather packets, no longer pass certain weather packets to the findU server (which sends the data to MADIS which sends them on to over 450 user agencies). If your weather data are no longer getting to findU or to MADIS, then you need to check about which servers you should use.
Mar 25, 2008 - There will be no weekly update to the CWOP database due to an injury to the updater (broken small bone above ankle). Hopefully things will return to near normal next week.
Mar 17, 2008 - Dave Helms (CW0350, CW0351) has developed a CWOP Archive Search using on-line Google search technology. This allows you to enter an item and find if it has been discussed on the CWOP Data Quality Discussion List. For example, enter "barometer calibration" and you'll see postings that discussed how to calibrate your barometer.
Mar 08, 2008 - With great pride, we announce that Philip Gladstone (CW0003) has been selected to receive a NOAA Environmental Hero Award on Earth Day, 2008. He was nominated by the National Weather Service, NOAA Oceanic & Atmospheric Research and the NOAA Office of Education for his volunteer effort in developing and maintaining a highly-praised web site that provides information to weather station operators. This gives citizen operators the necessary tools to improve the quality of the data they contribute to NOAA research and operations, which in turn results in better weather services for the general public. Philip is one of the key builders of CWOP and is highly deserving of this prestigious award.
Feb 26, 2008 - For those running Davis Weatherlink Software on a Windows system, Davis has issued an upgrade to the software to bring it up to V5.8.0. The new version of the software prevents crashes if the data is being accessed over a network and allows multiple connection ports. For those running Weatherlink software on a Macintosh System, they have issued upgrade V5.0.3c which resolves a problem with crashing when running Leopard systems. They also have released firmware updates for the Vantage Pro consoles in the form of Version 1.73. This fixed a bug that gave the High Rain Rate an incorrect time stamp and a bug that caused an inaccurate barometric reading at high elevation.
Feb 24, 2008 - We have started issuing CWOP IDs that start with DW followed by 4 numbers. We have run through 10,000 IDs that start with CW, so we have changed to DW and you can see the list of DW stations that have sent packets.
Feb 21, 2008 - There was a fire (or at least, smoke) near the cwop.aprs.net server at Texas A&M last night. Gerry Creager reports, "The Fire Dept has left but the smoke's still here". The effects on CWOP traffic can be seen as zeros in station count and in packet count for CWOP-1, CWOP-2, CWOP-3 from 01 to 03 UTC for 20080221.
Feb 10, 2008 - This graph shows the bytes/CWstation/hour on APRS-IS since the start of the year. On Jan 19 (hour 433), e-mails were sent to about 150 CW station operators who were sending too many packets, and the bytes/hour started to decrease as people reduced their packet rate. As more CWOP members reduced their packet rate, this reduction continued to Feb 04:03UTC (hour 819) with a value of about 800 bytes/hour. Then, third.aprs.net and fourth.aprs.net were removed and the bytes/hour decreased by about 25% because packets (and bytes) were not reaching APRS-IS. This continued until Feb 06:12 (hour 876) when servers third and fourth were returned and the value returned to slightly above 800 bytes/hour. However, the next day, Feb 07:06, there was a problem with first.aprs.net, and the bytes/hour dropped again, but not as far this time because Gerry Creager (AP009) was working to bring another APRS server online for CWOP use. On Feb09:08 (hour944), Gerry got the new server working fairly reliably and the bytes/hour value is back to the level of Feb 06 and reasonably stable. All CWOP members are encouraged to use "cwop.aprs.net" with either port 14580 or port 23 to reach Gerry's server. Also, be sure to follow the recommendations of item #1 of the CWOP FAQ regarding how often and when to send packets.
Feb 07, 2008 - The author of the software package used by all the APRS-IS servers has asked that all CWOP members use a server designation of "cwop.aprs.net" and port 14580. This changes earlier recommendations made here. Specifically, members are asked to no longer use "rotate.aprs.net" and to not use individual server names. The packet rate recommendation under item # 1 of the CWOP FAQ remains unchanged. Any changes to CWOP recommendations will be posted here.
Jan 28, 2008 - This appeared in the NWS Weather Forecast Office Seattle Winter 2007 Sky-Warn Spotter News: "Citizen Weather Observing Program (CWOP) - CWOP is a system that permits those with automated weather stations to report their data on-line to a suite of weather observation web sites. A growing number of Skywarn weather spotters are taking advantage of this opportunity. If you have an automated weather station linked to your personal computer combined with broadband or DSL communications, or you get such a system as a gift, please visit www.wxqa.com for more information if you are interested. You could join the CWOP team!"
Jan 23, 2008 - Dieter Bradbury reported this news item about Personal Weather Stations in the Portland Press Herald Maine Sunday Telegram.
Jan 21, 2008 - Yesterday, there was a slashdot posting about Personal Weather Stations that mentioned CWOP. Because of this, the CWOP web site traffic for yesterday was about eight times normal.
Jan 16, 2008 - There is a new recommendation on the maximum data packet rate that CWOP members should use to send their data. This is discussed under item # 1 of the CWOP FAQ linked from the upper right. Note that if you are sending packets more often than one every 10 minutes, you should reduce your packet rate to that and you should select the minute you transmit as pointed out in item # 1 of the CWOP FAQ.
Jan 07, 2008 - Steve Dimse reports that in 2007, the findU server received 422,262,687 weather reports and this is a 29.5% increase over 2006. Since 2000, about 1.24 billion weather reports have been received by findU.
Jan 04, 2008 - Jason Karvelot of Davis Instruments will give a CWOP-related presentation concerning Atmospheric Observations for Weather and Climate at the AMS Annual Meeting in New Orleans later this month.
Jan 01, 2008 - The CWOP Search Tool has been used for the past year as shown by the searches per day over 2007. Item #8 in the CWOP FAQ tells how to use the search tool to check your data through most of the paths they take through CWOP.
Dec 26, 2007 - This is a CWOP-related item from the Hanford, CA NWS Weather Forecast Office.
Dec 20, 2007 - Here is a news article by Donna Healy of the Billings Gazette from last spring that mentions CWOP.
Dec 07, 2007 - We're happy to report that Weather Underground has started posting APRSWXNET/CWOP weather data on their extensive web site. This WU blog posting gives some information. They obtain the data from MADIS and derive an ID for each of the APRSWXNET/CWOP stations by adding "M" in front of the 5 character NWS ID.
Nov 28, 2007 - This article by Laura Frazier of the Tampa Tribune tells about CWOP and about reporting citizen weather data to the NWS.
Nov 22, 2007 - This shows daily citizen weather station traffic on APRS-IS during 15 May 2005 to 22 Nov 2007. Also shown is an expanded scale view covering 2007 only. The changeover to the APRS Core servers that started January 6 of this year (see four January 2007 news items below) is shown here.
Nov 10, 2007 - Here's a report titled "Post-hurricane Analysis of Citrus Canker Spread and Progress towards the Development of a Predictive Model to Estimate Disease Spread Due to Catastrophic Weather Events". The analysis used CWOP weather observations.
Nov 02, 2007 - Brian Hamilton reports that his Weather-Display program, which was the first program that supported CWOP, can now be used on an Intel MAC.
Oct 24, 2007 - Steve Dimse is installing a new and more capable server at findU. Read more about it and how to test it for Steve here.
Oct 14, 2007 - Here is a weather station with no computer that sends data directly to the internet. In addition to using an Ethernet connection to the internet, it can also use a wireless connection to a Wi-Fi access point to send data to CWOP on the internet.
Oct 02, 2007 - If you are having trouble sending your packets to an aprs server (as some currently are), try changing the aprs server designation in your local software to "rotate.aprs.net", and use port 14580. This is the most reliable way to send your weather data to CWOP.
Sep 19, 2007 - Google Directory ranks web pages in various categories and sub-categories. The Google Science - Earth Sciences - Meteorology sub-category ranks 1,073 web sites and the CWOP web site is the fifth one according to the Google PageRank order.
Aug 27, 2007 - We have just learned of this somewhat dated item recently. It has an interesting perspective on CWOP in the second paragraph.
Aug 21, 2007 - Davis Instruments has released firmware version 1.7 for their Vantage Pro 2 line of weather stations and that new firmware can be downloaded here.
Aug 13, 2007 - The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Science and Technology Directorate, lists CWOP and MADIS as national assets for the "BioWatch" network in Meteorological Integration for the Biological Warning and Incident Characterization (BWIC) System: General Guidance for BWIC Cities dated February 2007.
Aug 05, 2007 - This graph shows CW and Ham weather station traffic on APRS-IS over the past four years. Note the increases that always seem to happen just after people have opened certain Christmas presents.
July 15, 2007 - The following message is from Steve Dimse, K4HG, "Ten years ago today I registered aprs.net. For a week or two before that I had been testing APRServe, with consolidated data from San Francisco, Atlanta, and Miami, but the switch over to aprs.net marks the official birthday of the APRS Internet System. What a decade it has been! Thanks to all the (far too many to name) hams whose contributions have grown the system to what it is today." Also, lots of non-hams have made contributions to CWOP (APRSWXNET) during this time and thanks also goes to them.
July 01, 2007 - The RSS feed associated with this CWOP News page is operational again thanks to Philip Gladstone. Previously, an internet service was being used, but that service has apparently vanished for good. So, Philip has developed his own RSS service and that is how you can find changes on this page. If you were already signed up, you may have to sign up again.
June 28, 2007 - Some newer members may not be aware that CWOP has an on-line store. CafePress distributes several summer-time items like hats and T-shirts with the CWOP logo displayed in full color. CWOP gets no money from these sales as all items are offered at the minimum CafePress price.
June 11, 2007 - The CWOP Search Tool now shows the last packet from the searched for station for each of the last ten days. It also shows number of packets from that station in the last hour of each day and total number of packets from that station in each of the last ten days.
June 06, 2007 - As of last week, the MADIS surface data set is being used in a high resolution (1.5 km) local area model to provide plume dispersion information to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with the Geo-Targeted Alerting System (GTAS) using the FXC workstation. In the event of a toxic release in the Washington D.C. area, plume maps (an example is shown in the FXC link) will allow forecasters to quickly identify the propagation of a toxic cloud and alert DHS officials in real-time. DHS emergency preparedness officials will then be able to determine public warning areas for reverse-911 call-outs. Depending on the results of a one year test, this public warning capability is planned for expansion to all major metropolitan areas in the country. CWOP is the largest MADIS mesonet comprising over 20% of MADIS stations.
June 04, 2007 - MesoWest has a new feature called MyMesoWest where you can construct your own way to view the weather data in your (or any) local area. Here's a MyMesoWest profile for the Boulder, CO area.
May 08, 2007 - There is now the capability to list new stations by NWS County Warning Area (CWA). In addition, you can subscribe to an RSS feed of new CWOP stations for a given CWA. Use this CWA map and click on your CWA to see the list and to subscribe to the RSS feed.
Apr 16, 2007 - The week of April 15-21, 2007, has been designated as National Volunteer Week following Executive Order 13041, “Responsibilities of Federal Departments and Agencies with Respect to Volunteer Community Service.” This Executive Order is intended to ensure that the Federal Government supports and encourages volunteer community service. CWOP is thousands of volunteer members contributing weather data useful at the community level and useful to NOAA at the national level. During National Volunteer Week, CWOP volunteers will contribute about 2.5 million local weather observations as a public service.
Apr 11, 2007 - Philip Gladstone has updated his RSS new sites page to incorporate a new feature from Google. Check it out here. Adding "?site=C0351&within=100" (without the quotes) to the end of the URL will restrict the area. In this case, to within 100 miles of CW0351.
Mar 07, 2007 - A 4Mb video of the NOAA Mesonet Map gust data from a recent upper midwest low pressure system covers a 48 hour period with each frame covering two hours.
Mar 01, 2007 - Heather Newman of the Detroit Free Press wrote a story asking "What's the weather on your block?" and answers "Ultra-local backyard meteorologists can tell you". More details.
Feb 25, 2007 - The Arctic Climate Monitoring Program (ACMP) is a K-12 program sponsored by the National Science Foundation, National Weather Service Alaska Region, and the University of Alaska. CWOP provides this educational program a good way to collect data at numerous student operated weather station sites in Alaska.
Feb 1, 2007 - There is now a way to view CWOP snow data. To view your snow data, just replace the 5 character NWS ID (C5634) with your 5 character NWS ID in the URL. There will be some type of map access soon along with this help page.
Jan 27, 2007 - Three weeks after the change in APRS-IS servers nearly half of the CW stations have changed over to using Core servers. We recommend that all CWOP members sending data via the internet should enter "rotate.aprs.net" with port 14580 as their designated server. More info under items 1 & 2.
Jan 20, 2007 - Two weeks after the change in APRS-IS servers, data flow has been irregular. This was caused by some CWOP members continuing to use the old, unreliable servers that are no longer recommended. The Core servers have been 100% reliable during this time and no data packets sent to the recommended Core servers were lost. Everyone should change their server list following these procedures.
Jan 13, 2007 - One week after the change in recommended APRS-IS servers, CWOP data flow is near normal. Members are gradually changing over to the new recommendations using information under items # 1 & 2. Most of the program authors have changed the default servers in their programs so that if you upgrade your software, you will also update your server list. One way to see if you are using a recommended server is to look at the raw packet list linked from the left side of most findU pages and see if one or more of FIRST, CORE-2, APRSFL, or FIFTH appear in the most recent packets at the bottom of the raw packet list.
Jan 6, 2007 - The Tier 2 APRS-IS server operators have decided to discontinue their support of CWOP. If you have not already done it, you should change servers to one of the Core servers as discussed here. It is best to use port 14580 at this time.
Dec 30, 2006 - Here's a listing of weather station sites that have nearby pictures available. These pictures may or may not be of the weather station or of the site, but they are interesting! Click on "Find nearby photographs in Flickr".
Dec 26, 2006 - A Search Tool for the CWOP database is now available. Click on "Member Lists" above to access it.
Dec 17, 2006 - This National Park Service Report shows that CWOP Data are in the National Park Service Climate Inventory. CWOP stations contribute the largest number of real-time stations near these National Park Service boundaries of all available networks.
Nov 13, 2006 - Jason Karvelot of Davis Instruments Corp. has prepared a presentation and paper for the 87th American Meteorological Society (AMS) Annual Meeting in San Antonio, TX in January 2007. The paper is titled New Cooperative Observer Networks and Instrumentation Data Quality and presents results on data quality of weather stations like those used in CWOP.
Oct 25, 2006 - Here's a listing of the APRS-IS server traffic for the APRS-IS servers. This shows internet only traffic and does not include any station that sent data via radio. This is the first place to check if you are having a problem connecting to one of the servers. If that server is showing reduced traffic or none at all, try one of the ones that is showing fairly steady traffic.
Oct 6, 2006 - There are different ways to use dense, high quality, mesonet observations, and the IPPC Decision Tool shows yet another one. Oregon State University's IPPC has developed an on-line decision aid using mesonet observations to initialize phenology models and a degree-day calculator in support of agricultural and pest management decision making. The mesonet observations, including CWOP, used in the database are linked with 44 degree-day models for prediction of insect propagation, plant diseases, weeds, crops, and mating disruption pheromones. An explanation is given on this poster.
Oct 2, 2006 - Here's a Master's Thesis titled "A Study of the Viability of a Mesoscale Network using Rooftop Weather Systems" by Ashlee Caroline Hicks. Ashlee used CWOP data in her research at Florida State University.
Sep 28, 2006 - Here's a news item about home weather stations in the Spokane, WA area.
Sep 15, 2006 - A video of the MADIS wind data for Hurricane Ernesto landfall on the North Carolina coast is available and covers a 36 hour period with each frame showing two hours.
Sep 04, 2006 - FindU now has support for tide stations; "call=k4hg" or "lat=24.6&lon=-81.5" in the URL after the question mark provide other location criteria. Comparisons with measured tide levels using a battery-powered water level measurement device designed for APRS are available. More tide level data are available from another one of these units located on the end of a pier.
Aug 17, 2006 - Here are three items urging people to join CWOP. These are from NWS Forecast Office newsletters/documents: (1) Jackson, KY, Tech Tips on page 5; (2) Seattle, WA, Skywarn Spotter Notes, lower quarter of page; (3) Hanford, CA, Emergency Preparedness Committee.
Aug 5, 2006 - The Royal Meteorological Society educational weather project, MetLinkInternational, is an internet-based activity where participants make and exchange weather observations by means of an online database. Using these data along with weather charts, satellite images and web cams, meteorological professionals show how to analyse and interpret the observations. Malcolm Walker, the Education Resources Manager of the Royal Met Society, welcomes any questions and invites interested CWOP members to participate in the two upcoming observation periods, Sept. 25 to 29, 2006 and Jan. 29 to Feb. 09, 2007.
July 22, 2006 - MesoWest has developed a very neat mapping application based on Google maps. It can be accessed here and comes up for RAWS stations in Colorado. To see CWOP and other stations, use the settings box in the upper right to select "All Networks" and press "Map It!". To select other areas in North America use the adjacent box. Lots of other features too!
May 25, 2006 - The Davis website now has the released version of Weatherlink 5.7 available for download. Note that the APRS string is in the Log file for diagnostic purposes. For Vantage Pro and Vantage Pro2 systems, the raw barometer reading, R reduction value and Altimeter Setting is in the Log file adjacent to the APRS string to help ensure correct data. Due to unexpected staff changes, there was no Beta version testing. Davis asks people in the field to use the latest software and let them know if it appears that correct data is being reported. Please note that for Weather Monitor II users, it's up to you to set your systems manually to the altimeter setting value.
May 19, 2006 - This summer, the University of Alaska is sponsoring weather stations in the Bering Strait School District around Nome. Also the Fairbanks NWS Weather Forecast Office is sponsoring weather stations at Alaska DOT sites around Fairbanks. The station IDs ending in "A2" in this list of Alaskan CWOP stations will comprise this combined network shown in the map of Alaska CWOP stations.
Apr 22, 2006 - CWOP will be represented at the Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA this weekend. A 5.25 MB Power Point on what CWOP is and does will be presented in the Citizen Science session on Saturday afternoon.
Apr 9, 2006 - Dave Klimas, N7DRK, has designed a way to send weather data to CWOP over the internet without using a computer. He modified a very small serial to ethernet adapter to send the data stream from his weather station to the aprs servers on the internet without a computer. Details of what he did and a picture of the very small unit are here.
Mar 23, 2006 - Philip Gladstone, CW0003, has added a CWOP equipment types in use page to his CWOP Quality Checking pages. It shows how many of each of the many hardware/software combinations are in use within the CWOP network.
Mar 18, 2006 - Three new programs that support CWOP have been added to the CWOP info page in the table a few screens down. This brings the total to 22 different software packages that support CWOP.
Mar 5, 2006 - A Google search feature is now located at the bottom of the Main Page of this web site. It's interesting to search the site for different IDs and see how often they appear.
Mar 3, 2006 - Karl Uppiano, CW3375, has written a 1-Wire Weather Service for Java. A complete description is given here.
Feb 18, 2006 - The Julian Day 49 (Saturday) data outage was not a problem with APRS-IS but rather the result of a cold weather related rolling blackout at the NOAA facility in Boulder, CO. Normally a large motor-generator would handle the electrical outage, but the transfer switch did not function properly and power to the entire facility, including the MADIS server, was down for several hours.
Feb 9, 2006 - At 9 PM, WALA Fox 10 News in Mobile, Alabama used CWOP data on the air for the first time. Doug Peters, Fox 10 News Meteorologist, reports that they plan on using local CWOP temperatures on some or all of their newscasts and in the event of a storm, they also can plot wind speeds from CWOP stations.
Jan 10, 2006 - WeatherUnderground, the Internet's first weather information portal, has added Citizen Weather Observer Program links to its Additional Resources page, including the CWOP Weather Station Resources page, Weather Station Guide, and Philip Gladstone's QC Listserver. Both CWOP and WeatherUnderground hope to support the Personal Weather Station hobbyist with these combined resources.
Jan 06, 2006 - Here's a CWOP article in the Winter 2005/2006 issue of Bay Breezes Spotter newsletter published by the NWS SF Bay Area/Monterey Weather Forecast Office. The CWOP article is on page 11.
April 2002 to December 2005 - Older CWOP news items are available here.
| Page generated on May 04, 2008. Site maintained by Russ Chadwick, KB0TVJ. Send any comments to russ at wxqa dot com |
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